‘Time’ was a song T wrote the day before he turned thirty in 2006. A few months previously, he and the Southern Time team had put on the first iteration of ‘Southern Time’ as a multimedia stage production in Vancouver, B.C. Despite being deep in debt, T was full of hope and inspiration for what his future might hold.

‘Tralfamador’ came as a most pleasant surprise as The Promise was recording ‘Lost in Love No More’ in the spring of 2020. Bryant Didier, who played bass on and produced the album, got inspiration from the brief intro of ‘Desert Moon’ to expand the piano chord arpeggio into a nearly one-minute soundscape of instrumental oblivion.

In 2002, soon after T turned twenty-six and moved into his place in downtown Vancouver, determined to make his ‘rock star dreams’ a reality, he wrote ‘Desert Moon.’ By then, T had lived with HIV for six or seven years, and ‘Desert Moon’ captures the isolation, marginalization, HIV stigma and despair he felt.

In 2004, T wrote ‘Searching For Love.’ He had played the cello and piano in a few rock bands for a couple of years, but he hadn’t chosen music as his career only to play ‘second fiddle.’ Since testing HIV positive in 1996, when he was twenty, he had wanted to make the world better through his story and his music. That year, he attended a four-week workshop on merging business with art, and it was there that T realized his story and music would best be told as a rock opera.

‘Lies’ is what one gets for ‘searching for love in all the wrong places.’ T wrote this song in 2004, when he was twenty-eight. He was fed up with the vain promises and fake personas in Vancouver’s music industry, not to mention the lies he saw in the mainstream media, especially about the ‘War on Terror.’ Lies in religion, the lies everyone tells everyone: that’s why our world is so messed up.

In 2014, ‘Neville’ was inspired by a breakthrough in T’s reconciliation with the cello professor who infected him with HIV nearly twenty years earlier. Not too long after, though, the professor refused to give T his consent to represent his likeness in the screenplays for the Southern Time story T was writing at the time. However, for a brief moment (and for a couple of years before the professor passed away in 2018), T and the professor were at least somewhat warm towards each other for the first time, though it may have been performative. T describes this song’s lyrics as “coming to terms with one’s inner child, the masculine, feminine, animalistic and God parts within every one of us.”

T wrote ‘Hey, Charlie’ in 2018 in preparation for AIDS 2018, inspired by the seemingly ‘full’ reconciliation he and the professor had reached a year and a half earlier. The professor passed away a few months later. T wrote it from the perspective of Dreamer and Chuck (the character based on the professor in Dreamer) as five- or six-year-olds, playing together as friends. It is a message that, if Dreamer and Charlie, as children and adults, can find a way to reconcile and become best friends, perhaps the rest of the world can also restore justice.

The last song on the album, heard in the player above and the video below, is ‘When The Fired Dreams.’ It is the most ‘poppy-sounding’ song on the album, other than ‘Hey, Charlie.’ T and Bryant wrote it together in 2019 and 2020. It is included as a bonus track when you buy the whole album.

Buy the songs from ‘Lost in Love No More’ at thepromiserocks.com.

And to hear The Promise’s new songs first, become a founding member for $1 USD: southerntime.ca/founding-members